![]() Outlook: The Wow! Signal Drives Curiosity (and maybe that is all that matters). When Popular Mechanics published an article concerning his team’s theory, astronomers from Ohio State University pointed out that comets could not have accounted for the signal. However, even Paris’ theory doesn’t seem to be accepted by everyone. ![]() New Study Says an Extra-Dimension May Explain Dark Matter They also tested readings by three different comets and found results in the data very similar to the Wow! Signal. They elaborated on their theory by proving that two different comets had been in the exact area that the Big Ear telescope had been monitoring that night. He and his team argued that the movement of a comet would explain why the signal was never heard again. Petersburg College in Florida, published a paper in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences that proposed that the signal may have come from a hydrogen cloud accompanying a comet. More recently, astronomer Antonio Paris, out of St. Other theories posit a possible supernova and even a glitch in the university’s computer system. However, since no other telescopes picked up the signal that night, those two theories seem to wash out. Initial explanations included a stray signal from an unknown military satellite and possibly even a signal that may have bounced off the Moon. There have been many theories put forward to explain the Wow! Signal. ![]() The signal intensity of 10 to 11 was represented by the letter A, and 11 to 12 was represented by a B, and so on. 0s and 1s were simply silent delays in computer processing, while numbers ranging from 1 to 9 indicated a range of low to mid-intensity cosmic signals. The university’s computer system to measure the intensity of signals from space used a simple alpha-numeric code. The data that came back from the signal stood out amongst the low numbers of background noise. ![]() One of the team members, Jerry Ehman, recorded a 72-second signal that, at the time, was pointed at a group of stars called Chi Saggittarii in the Sagittarius constellation. In August of 1977, a team of astronomers at Ohio State Observatory detected something unusual while using “The Big Ear,” the appropriately named radio telescope at Ohio State University. But in 1977, a lone radio astronomer in Ohio detected a signal that was so out of the ordinary that he couldn’t help but scribble one word next to the data he’d received “Wow!” Background: What is the “Wow!” Signal? The search for extraterrestrial life using radio signals has been an uphill battle for decades, yielding very few results. ![]()
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